d, thanks to
two days' canvassing by Auchmuty and myself, begging men to come, we had
sixty. Half the others were in Europe. But without a quorum we could do
nothing. All the rest of us waited grimly for our four hours, and
adjourned without any action. At the fourth meeting we had flagged, and
only got fifty-nine together. But on the first appearance of my
double,--whom I sent on this fatal Monday to the fifth meeting,--he was
the _sixty-seventh_ man who entered the room. He was greeted with a
storm of applause! The poor fellow had missed his way,--read the street
signs ill through his spectacles (very ill, in fact, without them),--and
had not dared to inquire. He entered the room,--finding the president
and secretary holding to their chairs two judges of the Supreme Court,
who were also members _ex officio_, and were begging leave to go away.
On his entrance all was changed. _Presto_, the by-laws were suspended,
and the Western property was given away. Nobody stopped to converse with
him. He voted, as I had charged him to do, in every instance, with the
minority. I won new laurels as a man of sense, though a little
unpunctual,--and Dennis, _alias_ Ingham, returned to the parsonage,
astonished to see with how little wisdom the world is governed. He cut a
few of my parishioners in the street; but he had his glasses off, and I
am known to be near-sighted. Eventually he recognized them more readily
than I.

I "set him again" at the exhibition of the New Coventry Academy; and
here he undertook a "speaking part,"--as, in my boyish, worldly days, I
remember the bills used to say of Mlle. Celeste. We are all trustees of
the New Coventry Academy; and there has lately been "a good deal of
feeling" because the Sandemanian trustees did not regularly attend the
exhibitions. It has been intimated, indeed, that the Sandemanians are
leaning towards Free-Will, and that we have, therefore, neglected these
semiannual exhibitions, while there is no doubt that Auchmuty last year
went to Commencement at Waterville. Now the head master at New Coventry
is a real good fellow, who knows a Sanskrit root when he sees it, and
often cracks etymologies with me,--so that, in strictness, I ought to go
to their exhibitions. But think, reader, of sitting through three long
July days in that Academy chapel, following the programme from

TUESDAY MORNING. _English Composition._ "SUNSHINE." Miss Jones.

round to

_Trio on Three Pianos._